Michael Yates writes
>But it seems to me that capitalism has succeeded
>rather well in preparing young people to believe just
>about anything and not to know how to analyze anything.
and triggers a most interesting debate. It shows that the revolution in the
industrial methods of the society (gesellschaftliche Betriebsweise) which
is the necessary result of the revolution in the instruments of production
and which today is commonly known as the crisis of the post-Fordist society
does not leave out such "derived" sectors of the society as the educational
system.
I wonder whether there is any comprehensive book of relevance on the
Political Economy of Education in the US which combines studies on national
accounts, class analysis, economic and technological developments of the
last decades, and on the legislative and fiscal situation of the
educational system with more current results of research in the cognitive
process in the interacting system of learning and teaching.
Hinrich Kuhls
>>>>>>>>>>>
Marx on education (Capital volume 1, chapter 15, section 9 passim):
Factory legislation, that first conscious and methodical reaction of
society against the spontaneously developed form of the process of
production, is, as we have seen, just as much the necessary product of
modern industry as cotton yam, self-actors, and the electric telegraph. (...)
Paltry as the education clauses of the Act appear on the whole, yet they
proclaim elementary education to be an indispensable condition to the
employment of children. [*] The success of those clauses proved for the
first time the possibility of combining education and gymnastics [**] with
manual labour, and, consequently, of combining manual labour with education
and gymnastics. The factory inspectors soon found out by questioning the
schoolmasters, that the factory children, although receiving only one half
the education of the regular day scholars, yet learnt quite as much and
often more.
"This can be accounted for by the simple fact that, with only being at
school for one half of the day, they are always fresh, and nearly always
ready and willing to receive instruction. The system on which they work,
half manual labour, and half school, renders each employment a rest and a
relief to the other; consequently, both are far more congenial to the
child, than would be the case were he kept constantly at one. It is quite
clear that a boy who has been at school all the morning, cannot (in hot
weather particularly) cope with one who comes fresh and bright from his
work." [***]
Further information on this point will be found in Senior's speech at the
Social Science Congress at Edinburgh in 1863. He there shows, amongst other
things, how the monotonous and uselessly long school hours of the children
of the upper and middle classes, uselessly add to the labour of the
teacher, "while he not only fruitlessly but absolutely injuriously, wastes
the time, health, and energy of the children." [****]
>From the Factory system budded, as Robert Owen has shown us in detail, the
germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of
every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction
and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency
of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human
beings. (...)
One step already spontaneously taken towards effecting this revolution is
the establishment of technical and agricultural schools, and of "écoles
d'enseignement professionnel," in which the children of the working-men
receive some little instruction in technology and in the practical handling
of the various implements of labour. Though the Factory Act, that first and
meagre concession wrung from capital, is limited to combining elementary
education with work in the factory, there can be no doubt that when the
working-class comes into power, as inevitably it must, technical
instruction, both theoretical and practical, will take its proper place in
the working-class schools. There is also no doubt that such revolutionary
regents, the final result of which is the abolition of the old division of
labour, are diametrically opposed to the capitalistic form of production,
and to the economic status of the labourer corresponding to that form. But
the historical development of the antagonisms, immanent in a given form of
production, is the only way in which that form of production can be
dissolved and a new form established. (...)
---------
[*] According to the English Factory Act, parents cannot send their
children under 14 years of age into Factories under the control of the Act,
unless at the same time they allow them to receive elementary education.
The manufacturer is responsible for compliance with the Act. "Factory
education is compulsory, and it is a condition of labour." ("Rep. Insp.
Fact., 31st Oct., 1865," p. 111.)
[**] On the very advantageous results of combining gymnastics (and drilling
in the case of boys) with compulsory education for factory children and
pauper scholars, see the speech of N. W. Senior at the seventh annual
congress of "The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science,"
in "Report of Proceedings, &c.," Lond. 1863, pp. 63, 64, also the "Rep.
Insp. Fact., 31st Oct., 1865," pp. 118, 119, 120, 126, sqq.
[***] "Rep. Insp. Fact., 31st Oct., 1865," p. 118. A silk manufacturer
naively states to the Children's Employment Commissioners: "I am quite sure
that the true secret of producing efficient workpeople is to be found in
uniting education and tabour from a period of childhood. Of course the
occupation must not be too severe, nor irksome, or unhealthy. But of the
advantage of the union I have no doubt. I wish my own children could have
some work as well as play to give variety to their schooling." ("Ch. Empl.
Comm. V. Rep.," p. 82, n. 36.)
[****] Senior, l. c., p. 66. How Modern Industry, when it has attained to a
certain pitch, is capable, by the revolution it effects in the mode of
production and in the social conditions of production, of also
revolutionising people's minds, is strikingly shown by a comparison of
Senior's speech in 1863, with his philippic against the Factory Act of
1833; or by a comparison, of the views of the congress above referred to,
with the fact that in certain country districts of England poor parents are
forbidden, on pain of death by starvation, to educate their children. Thus,
e.g., Mr. Snell reports it to be a common occurrence in Somersetshire that,
when a poor person claims parish relief, he is compelled to take his
children from school. Mr. Wollarton, the clergyman at Feltham, also tells
of cases where all relief was denied to certain families "because they were
sending their children to school!"
